My work for the web has been included in Rhizome's Artbase, runme.org, no-org.net, Machinista 2003/Artificial Intelligence and Art, javamuseum.org, sendecki.com, newmediafest.org. It has been shown at the Fredericton Independent Film & Video Alliance Conference, and supported by the Banff Centre's New Media program. In 2005 one of my pieces was nominated for a Viper International award. My project "Bstat Zero" will be featured in February 2006 as an Artport project of the Whitney Museum Of Art. I have been a guest panelist at Banff and founded Manitoba Visual Arts Network in 1994. I've been a member of Rhizome from its first year. My personal web site is http://room535.org

I started my career as a printmaker, moved into photo-based art, and in 1990 began using computers in my work. My work has appeared throughout Canada both in public galleries and artist-run centers. I have also exhibited in the U.S., Great Britain and South America. My woodcut prints interpreting zoomed digital images have twice won awards at the Boston Printmakers' "North American Print" biennial and have been shown in various print competitions and venues, including The Print Center (Philadelphia) and International Print Center New York.

There are many reasons why the metaphor of the timeline appealed tome for this project. First, there are the obvious associations with time and aging, and this work began as a poem about getting old. But the timeline also embodies a particular kind of time--that is, it lets you replay, much as we replay for ourselves the images and words thatmake up our lives. On the one hand there is the sense that there's acontinuous flow, a whole video that makes up our lives, but on theother there's the sense of the fragmentary and the random. "Timeline" is a metaphor for this contradiction. The user creates a poem out of random acts, i.e. by selecting images from a database of images each of which is associated with a few lines from the original poem. The associations are not known in advance. But more importantly, one doesn't know the shape of the original poem which, like our ideologies and abstractions, may turn out, in the long run, not to be relevant to the poem that one creates out of the particulars of one's own experience. So, the poem is in effect many poems, which you can play and replay in their various combinations of image and text, which through their interplay have the potential to create new meanings.

Guardian Angel is what it is, a student project, the kind of thing you take seriously in the classroom. Gupta's piece, by virtue of its Tate cache and her history of previous work, asks for more: an international audience, thoughtful consideration, a place in contemporary art practice. But like so much net art, it is essentially a one-liner in which the labor of production far exceeds its cultural or intellectual or aesthetic value. It comes supplied with essays which attempt to place it in contemporary political and aesthetic contexts. But works of art can't stay afloat on the the life-jackets of the texts that surround them. Yet this is so often the practice in contemporary net art and often--though not in this case--the essays have more interest than the works themselves.

The question of labor exceeding value is of central importance to the discussion of net art. Anyone who has ever put together a complex web site or programmed a complex piece of software art knows how much work goes into the production. But despite this labor the result for the viewer is often minimal--some programmed twists of image manipulation or repetitive sets of images and/or texts in a database, where the viewer soon tires of looking at yet another of the same, or as here, in Gupta's case, an extended interactive site built around a one-liner, also repeated various times over.

Where, in fact, is the primary value of such works? The value is in the artist--in the personal experience of the artist in the process of creating the work, a that value is not sufficiently reflected back outward to the viewer. This is a significant alteration of the centers of value that we normally associate with art. And it's my feeling that until this changes, net art will remain peripheral--insititutions like the Walker will feel no compunction in shedding free of it and its audience will remain largely one of "experts".

> > > If that person revels in post-sturucturalist theory and always has a> copy of Barthes or Derrida under their folded arm, George Landow's> Hypertext 2.0 is a good one to send them.> > If the person is into gaming and spends time bouncing from MUD to MOO,> Espen Arseth's Cybertext:Oerspectives on Ergodic Literature should be> the pick.> > If they are a graphic designer or are visually literate, send them> Mark S Meadows's book Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive> Narrative.> > If they are a film studies guru, and their black turtleneck is> imblazoned with the phrase "Vertov this!", then Lev Manovich's The> Language of New Media would be right up their alley.> > If they like tossing McLuhanisms like "the medium is the message!"> into casual conversation, then they'll find themselves taken by Jay> David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation: Understanding New> Media.> > If they like comics, then Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics will> get them thinking in ways that suggest new forms and McCloud's> Reinventing Comics particularly points to digital media.> > If they like experimental poetry and are always trying to start up a> new lit mag, then Loss Pequeno Glazier's Digital Poetics will be> perfect.> > And if they are a computer scientist, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick> Montfort's The New Media Reader collects a historically based series> of essays that discuss the computer as an artistic medium.> > Best,> Brandon Barr> http://texturl.net> http://bannerart.org>

I was interested to read Brett Stalbaum's piece "DatabaseLogic(s) and Landscape Art" in the most recent Digest.

He makes the point that database systems are independent ofinterface and and remarks that "the technical organizationof data is" not "necessarily a strong predicate of userinterface", citing the "dogged reemergence of the commandline interface" in Linux and MacOSX. But Unix/IRIS operatingsystems have long set sophisticated GUI's side by side withCLI's, and what these parallel presentations of underlyingdata have recognized is the fundamental fact of all binaryinformation--its fluidity, its inherent potential to bepoured into any appropriate mold. HTML data, for instance,can be shaped not only to any browser/OS implementation butto any software which can read the data, as we've seen invarious interventions created by media artists.

Of the questions Stalbaum promises to treat in a laterinstallment, the one which I find most intriguing is "howthe nature and conceptions of place are altered bydatabase". If, on the one hand, the data-stream is fluid andopen to any workable intervention or interpretation, thesevery interpretations alter the way we see not just the databut the reality from which the data has emerged and which itrepresents. Think of operating systems. The metaphor of"windows" permeates our thinking and our feeling about thecomputer, suggesting that our experience is one of lookinginto, through, deeper (window beyond window), working offagainst the physical experience of the monitor, which is nowitself a window. In the command line interface the monitoris instead the extension of a the typewriter's sheet ofpaper, and its experience an experience of sequentiality, ofongoing process, the mute speech of a teletype responding toour mute inquisitions. With windows, which conceals itscomplexities, we give ourselves over, like Alice, to thephosphorescent illusion of the looking glass and itspleasures. So different from the command line, which neverlets us forget that is serious business, this is work.

In the early days of Rhizome, I argued that media art shouldget beyond the technological introversion of taking themedium for its subject, that it should use the medium forpurposes beyond itself, as a painter uses a brush, etc. Now, of course, there is all kinds of media art. ButI would no longer argue against the technologicallyself-reflexive. It became clear that as the web developed,a greater danger was that self-expression would besubsumed to corporate models because the tools that we wouldhave at our disposal would increasingly be the tools of themarketplace. This left a still important role for artistswhose interest was in interventions, in creating works whichstand between what is offered and what is possible, betweenthe interface and the data-stream.